Camondo Stairs

The Camondo Stairs are often explained through a family story. The Ottoman banker Abraham Salomon Camondo supposedly ordered a shortcut built for his grandchildren, who attended St. George's Austrian High School. According to this version, the curves of the flights were meant to stop a child if they fell. This is a legend: researchers have found no document for such a commission.

Archival plans offer a different chronology. The stairs do not yet appear on an early plan of the Tünel route, but they are already shown on a plan of the banking district from eighteen ninety. So they were most likely built in the late eighteen seventies or the eighteen eighties. Abraham Salomon died in eighteen seventy-three and could not have personally commissioned a later construction.

Still, the family name appeared here for a reason. The Camondos were in banking: they lent money to Ottoman ministers and businesses, and invested family capital in urban real estate. In eighteen fifty-five, Abraham Salomon joined a commission charged with putting Galata and Pera in order. The commission dealt with paving, lighting, and new office buildings. Camondo made credit available for their construction, some of it interest-free. After that, banks clustered around the lower street, including Camondo family offices and properties.

His grandsons, the bankers Abraham Behor and Nissim Camondo, continued the work. In eighteen sixty-nine, they moved to Paris to expand the family bank, but retained offices and real estate in Istanbul. Historians suppose that one of the brothers commissioned these stairs. The exact name is unknown; the result of the commission is before your eyes.

The lower street was then called Voyvoda Street; today it is Bankalar Caddesi—Bank Street. The upper one bore the Camondo family name; it is now called Banker Sokak. A sharp difference in elevation remained between them. The family turned it into a public passage: two stone flights diverge, rejoin, and lead from the banking buildings to the upper street.

The family bank disappeared, the Camondos left, and the upper street's former name was replaced. Their surname has remained attached precisely to the structure that still connects these two levels of Galata.